In existing compact peripheral component interconnect (cPCI) server systems, the management hardware is typically implemented with two separate pieces of hardware—a host processor card (HPC) and a hot swap controller (HSC). Some HPCs integrate the HSC into their functionality, but a large number of the cPCI systems have the HSC circuitry separate from the HPC in order to reduce cost and make the system more available.
Regardless of whether the HSC is integrated into the HPC, in standard cPCI systems, not only does the HPC manage the chassis, but it also runs the customer's operating system and software. With an HPC that runs a customer's operating system and software, and manages the infrastructure of the server system, processing cycles will be stolen by the manageability software, causing the operation of the customer software to run less efficiently. Furthermore, a poorly designed add-in card has the potential to cause the manageability software to dedicate so many resources to the bad acting card that the HPC could be rendered useless for other applications.
Another disadvantage to current solutions is that high availability is accomplished through having redundant HPCs with a fail-over mechanism. Not only is this complicated to set up, it adds complexity and cost to the chassis. Lastly, the upgrade path requires that the HPC that shares management functions with other applications must shut down at a potentially critical moment and cause data loss, or under the best of circumstances, a large inconvenience to the users of those other applications.
It would be desirable for a server system to provide a single, dedicated server management card that provides hot-swap functionality, and that is dedicated to server management, thereby avoiding the problems of a general purpose processing module that runs customer operating system and application software and that performs system management.